Someone once said to me that if you make music, you need to travel. He didn’t mean “you have to sit in a van otherwise you won’t get to your show”, he meant “if you want to grow as a musician, you need to be in different places and work with different people”.
Now Holland is a tiny place; from my home town it is quite hard to find a direction in which you can drive for two hours and still be in the same country. I think subconsciously I have been looking for opportunities abroad for a long time, and in a way it surprises me that not every single musician in Holland is working abroad at least half the time.
What I like about taking your music to new places is the fresh view on what you do. And quite often it’s a reality check. The first time the producer at the time for ‘WOW – The Show’ (the name of the tour we did two years ago) came to Holland to see what I did (it was an audition in essence) was like that. I had done everything I could to get myself at the highest level of performing Kate Bush’ songs. I had been working on them for a long time, people loved me performing them, but now all of a sudden it was nothing more than an OK starting point with a thousand things to improve. Plus I needed to become a professional contemporary dancer. Luckily, I was handed the tools to achieve the goals, and even though I have had some excrutiating experiences along the way, I got better quicker than I ever would have imagined.
So now I’m writing my own songs with Remco. The initial purpose was to write just for the hell of it, just for fun. No pressure, and if someone liked what we were doing, even better. I had hardly written anything in about ten years. But we decided to take the project abroad.
Remco and I are currently being pushed by our producer Francis. A lot. While our friends and family already love our songs as they are, they are not finished or good enough yet. And as weird as it is, we now have to work at the same level as some artists and songwriters I have always admired. And though I don’t always know how to do that, I love it! And once again: we are given a lot of suggestions, tools and information to learn and grow.
Another weird thing has happened: The Mycah Principle has turned into the most feelgood project I’ve ever been a part of (yes, more feelgood that Dreaming of Kate, because in that show I die on stage at least three times in every show). And so I am rewriting my lyrics to fit the new feel, and it’s a lot easier than I thought it would be.
I’m so curious what comes out of all this!
